in his words

Jimmy Reeves: Shot to the Heart

By Janet White The 700 Club

My name is Jimmy Reeves, and I’m an artist and musician.
Music is definitely my passion and definitely in the past few years has been the most direct way that I’ve connected and felt the presence of God in my life.

I came from a family of six. My father served in the military for 30 years. So
we moved up and and down the coast ... South Carolina, Virginia, and Florida…

Growing up, we were always going to church and encouraged to be active in it. When you're young, you don’t care, and you don’t want to go, and I think I definitely fell to that side of things. In my early teenage years, I was just rebellious and didn’t want anything to do with it.

I think one of the reasons I struggled is from moving around a lot and always having to remake friends.
I didn’t have a base of people that I grew up with.
That was leading me kind of into an indifference with my relationship with the Lord and church…

I was just longing more for acceptance and validation. I had gotten into a relationship. We were probably very serious. We were best friends for a long time. Then it became physical, and for about six or eight months it was like I’d invested pretty much everything into that person. At that point, I’d given my virginity away. One day, the girl found out she was moving to another state where her ex-boyfriend lived. Literally the next day, she wouldn’t return a phone call…

That kind of put me in a tailspin. It was that abrupt.
I was a complete wreck and just had no foundation to fall back on. I was having a really hard time dealing with that abrupt, disconnected, cut-off love…

So this was my source of love, and when that was taken away, you know without love, I found it hard to find a reason to live. I became suicidal. Why do I even want to be here?

I remember specifically just turning over in my bed, and I kinda had this headboard thing, and my Bible was there, and I grabbed it and opened it up to Psalms.

I started reading and reading the language and just connecting ... and got the passion and the emotion, just the rawness of how David wrote. You know those Psalms.

It was the first time I had read the Bible and felt something…

In that kind of dark place, I feel I really connected to the words of God for the first time.
I got excited because I connected to it, and it was so surprising, you know.

I started to feel that maybe God loved me and in an individual way.
I started reading Psalms and connecting to that raw emotion…

And I feel like in a sense, God really rescued me through the Word. You know, it was like a rescue.